Business news from Ukraine

Metinvest has raised employee salaries, restoring headcount and productivity

23 September , 2023  

Mining and Metallurgical Group Metinvest has managed to balance the number of employees and production productivity, which allowed it to approach the pre-war level of salaries, the company’s CEO Yuriy Ryzhenkov said, commenting on delo.ua inclusion in the list of five best employers in Ukraine according to the magazine “TOP-100. Ratings of the biggest”.

According to him, the rate of movement of salaries at the enterprises of the group is different, but the company finds opportunities to implement effective motivational systems, so that the income of employees is growing, and the situation in the company is stabilizing.

The top manager stated that the war has crushed Metinvest’s business. The company lost control over metallurgical enterprises in temporarily occupied Mariupol. It also had to suspend operations at its coke plant in frontline Avdeevka. The Group was forced to radically restructure its production activities, create completely new logistics and find alternative ways to export its products.

Another challenge for the company since the beginning of the war has been the mass migration of personnel and tangible loss of their qualifications. A significant part of Metinvest’s employees left for other regions or countries, changed their profession or specialization, or simply cannot work under such conditions. Besides, already more than 10% of Metinvest employees (more than 8 thousand employees) serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

According to the CEO, all this significantly reduces not only the potential of the Ukrainian mining and metallurgical complex in general, but also of Metinvest Group in particular. He emphasized that the outflow of human capital makes it too difficult to maintain current production volumes and restore it in the future, so the company pays great attention to the reintegration of employees returning to work from war.

“The company is deploying maximum resources to support employees. We have to make sure that our people are as safe as possible now, receive decent pay and have conditions for professional development,” Ryzhenkov said.

At the same time, it is noted that the company is interested in ensuring that military and civilians, who gave their health in the fight against the aggressor, return to full life as soon as possible and with the slightest discomfort. “Exactly such opportunities for the victims are provided by the equipment for early verticalization, which is now available in Ukraine thanks to the initiative “Saving Life”, – specified Tetyana Petruk, Director for Sustainable Development and Human Resources of Metinvest Group.

“Metinvest is a vertically integrated group of mining and metallurgical enterprises. The group’s enterprises are located mainly in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhya and Dnepropetrovsk regions.

The main shareholders of the holding are SCM Group (71.24%) and Smart Holding (23.76%), jointly managing the holding.

Metinvest Holding LLC is the management company of Metinvest Group.

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